The title of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" has never been taken so literally as it is in the Canadian import that opened Wednesday at American Conservatory Theater. When the door closes on the three people condemned for eternity to Sartre's hotel-room hell, they're locked off from the audience as well - visible only on closed-circuit monitor images on the vast wall outside their infernal bunker.

Closing the usually imaginary fourth wall is one of the inspired conceits of the "No Exit" co-created by Vancouver's Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre, receiving its U.S. premiere at ACT. As conceived and directed by Electric co-founder Kim Collier, it not only reframes the oft-staged drama but also adds a new dimension to its "hell is other people" theme.

Collier and her collaborators take Paul Bowles' streamlined English version and perform it "in concert with" a running commentary, often silent, called the Valet, written and performed by Electric co-founder Jonathon Young. With the main characters locked away - though omnipresent onscreen - Young's Valet is our primary connection to the action. And his hell, eternally watching the people in that room, becomes an intriguing gloss on theirs.

There are trade-offs in this approach. It robs us of the visceral audience-performer interaction, replacing it with the more passive film experience. But it also heightens our sense of the claustrophobic, observed fate of Sartre's threesome and provides a distancing frame for the more dated elements in the 1944 drama, written in Nazi-occupied Paris.

The actors add to that effect with filmic references of their own. Virtual Stage founder Andy Thompson, also responsible for the inventive fixed-camera video design, brings a flat, screen-melodrama overstatement to Cradeau, the self-styled crusading journalist who emotionally abused his wife and collaborated with the Nazis. His mannered screen persona is in striking contrast to the nuanced vitality he displays onstage.

Laara Sadiq plays cleverly with film noir as Inez, the old-fashioned predatory lesbian ("I need to see people suffer to exist at all"). The irresistible Lucia Frangione, as the vain, manipulative, man-hungry "baby killer" Estelle, channels French New Wave and Fellini in an elegant portrait punctuated with grotesque close-ups. (For an added treat, you can check out how tiny that room is after the show.)

Meanwhile, Young's Valet slyly comments on the action in silence, written messages or by interacting with the screen images, the audience and the telltale props scattered about Jay Gower Taylor's endlessly surprising, grunge-dour set. The loneliness of the long-distance Valet adds the notion that endless iterations of "No Exit" is its own form of hell.

But not this "No Exit." Though it's a different hell from Sartre's - replacing his open-ended mutual torment with a forever repeated one - it's a vivid variation on an eternal theme.